Concerning yesterday's entry about the hotel that charges half a grand for bad reviews: Here's HuffPo.

An absolute PR disaster. The Yelp reviews continue to pour in:

Or:

It's turning into community-generated open-source improvisational theater. The owners, no doubt, are just keeping their heads down and waiting for it all to blow over. I mean, no one can take seriously a bad review from Adolf H, can they?

REAL ESTATE Walt Disney's house is for sale. Sounds historic:

One bedroom, 2 baths. Surprisingly cheap: $535K? In Palm Desert? Well, head to the comments for enlightenment, where people dispute whether Walt ever lived there, complain about the color of the kitchen, complain about people who complain about color, and generally tear each other to shreds with bilious hatred.

CULTURE The NYT discovers "Middlebrow" every so often, and out comes an essay that defends it, or explains it, or tries to give it its due without too much endorsement. Here's the latest, discussing middlebrow's most fiercest critics.

Boo and/or hoo. Also, he was right - but the "elite affairs" that had "certain standards in common" had abandoned the old standards out of the sheer joy of demolishing the representative tradition, and art was unmoored from its history. when the Middlebrows went for the longhair stuff, it was more likely to be a classical symphony than a screeching atonal slab of Berg.

Here's an update of the old Life magazine illustrated chart of various Brow preferences.

PRO TIP Do not speed in Virginia. In Virginia? Do not speed. Thinking of speeding? Not in Virginia.


A Jalopnik writer tells what happens when he tested an impossibly fast car on the backroads of VA. He got a ticket. And he went to jail.

GEEK Finally, after years in the vault! The very first Star Wars "Empire" trailer to show live footage!
It's awful!

That font at the end: oy. The voice-over reminds you that Harrison Ford isn't the most dynamic line-reader of his generation. You really don't get the sense of the movie's sweep and scope, but that didn't matter. All we needed to know was that it was en route, and that was enough. The article also has the deleted scenes restored, and if you want to see Luke and Leia have a more . . . meaningful kiss than the final cut showed, well, there you go. Knowing what we know, though: no. And it reminds you that Lucas was just making it up as he went along, and ran out of ideas quite quickly. The brother-sister reveal was just one of the reasons "Jedi" was disappointing. Another familial relationship: surprise! We're going to blow up another Death Star: surprise! Not really.

(Via Slashgear, whcih has much more.)